This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Askesis: The Disappointment of My Anglican Journey

When I began to turn toward the historical Church as a more complete living out of my understanding of the Restoration Movement Plea, one of the things that attracted me was Benedictine monasticism. Here was a holistic structure of faithful living: work (most of it laborious and mundane) and study (always in obedience to the abbot, and thus the Church and the Faith), centered around the infusion of prayer and worship into the entire day. I longed for this sort of structure: the Eucharist, the daily office and personal devotions—all supporting my work and my study. One of my professors, J K Jones, remarked to me, in light of my concerns, that I may well be one to start a Protestant monastery.

As it happened, the first churches I came across that were Protestant and yet also had the structure I was seeking (Eucharist, office, prayers) were the Anglican churches. Indeed, later, as I was on the threshold of the Anglican church, Martin Thornton's English Spirituality and Christian Perfection only solidified this understanding. So in my final years at Ozark, I came to the notion that in Anglicanism I would find the sort of askesis I desired.

Unfortunately, that proved to be both true and false.

In the few months leading up to my confirmation in the Episcopal Church, as I read, studied and prayed with my priest, Fr. Jim, it became increasingly clear that my notion of Anglicanism, developed over the previous five years, was largely romanticized. Somehow, in the providence of God, the Anglicanism I encountered (mostly in books, though a handful of occasions in parishes and their priests) was or leaned heavily towards the Anglo-Catholic. So I knew about the Wednesday and Friday, and Lenten, fasts. I knew about the keeping of the daily office. I was prepared for regular confession. What I found, however, was no obligation to fast, no public celebration of the office, and very rare confession. To uphold these disciplines, I had to be prepared to do so alone. Certainly my priest encouraged me. But there was no public acknowledgment of these things by the parish, let alone the wider Episcopal church.

My priest and I did, several months after my confirmation, begin together to celebrate Morning Prayer in the chapel. And this turned into regular, public weekly offices. Indeed, soon I and several others, after some training, were licensed in the diocese as lay readers. But whether or not I kept the fasts (which were ambiguous and undefined—fasting from meat only? what about fish?), or made confession, or prayed the office was my business alone, or at least mine under pastoral counsel. My observance of these things—when I was able to observe them at all—did benefit me in my walk of faith. But it was sporadic, irregular, and, quite frankly, unhelpful.

When I entered the Episcopal seminary, there was the public praying of morning and evening prayers, with daily Eucharist. But these proved not only unhelpful for me, they proved quite positively detrimental to my faith. There was too much experimentation for these offices to ever become a discipline; things changed too much for anything from them to make marks on my soul and my prayer. Then, too, there was the distortion of the Faith. How could I be formed in the Faith once for all delivered to the saints, when I got instead imitations of or departures from it?

My last confession in the Episcopal Church is surely emblematic as surely as it was my last. I had, as I had done since my first confession, spent several days remembering my sins and repenting them. We prayed the rite, I voiced my sins. As was usual, the chaplain offered counsel. And it was that counsel that undid all the askesis of my confession: these were not sins, merely mistakes; my guilt was not real, only a state of mind. We prayed the remainder of the confessional liturgy. I left, and on the way back to my apartment, wept some. Yes, God had met my repentance with his mercy, rite or no rite. But having come expecting the ministry and faith of the Church, I was left with the emptiness of psychology. God forgive me, I was angry for many days after.

The Anglican churches gave me the structures and rites for which I'd been seeking. But they gave me no askesis. It was spiritual disciplines a la carte, a way of faith of my own making, dangerously well-suited to meet my own personal whims and idiosyncracies—and therefore to give me nothing in which to work out my salvation with fear and trembling. I wanted steak. I got a rice cake.

I was often faulted, both as a Restoration Movement Christian and as an Episcopalian, for wanting to be a monk. Perhaps. I looked into third-order lay membership in some brotherhoods. But I rather suppose what I was looking for was what my patron, Blessed Hieromonk Seraphim, well expressed: “We should not think that only the monks are responsible for living a Christian life; such an idea is not true; a monk is just like everyone else. Everyone must wake up. If you look at the early Church, there was no distinction as to who was a monk and who was a layman-they all recognized the truth and they saw that it was urgent, to be lived immediately.”

In Orthodoxy, there is the Eucharist, the daily office, many personal devotions, fasting (much more rigorous than I ever imagined as an Anglican), but most of all every single one of these askeses is tied point by point, frame and cloth, to the Faith once for all delivered to the saints. Here is no mere spiritual discipline to suit my fancy. Here is life. It really is that simple and stark.

Posted by Clifton at January 13, 2005 03:25 PM | TrackBack